Dental prostheses are typically manufactured at specialized dental laboratories that employ computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) milling systems to produce dental prostheses according to patient-specific specifications provided by dentists. In a typical work flow, information about the oral situation of a patient is received from a dentist, and the dentist or dental laboratory designs the dental prosthesis. Where the prosthesis is milled from a block of material, a material block having a size, shape, color, and material-type properties suitable for creating the prosthesis is selected. In conventional batch manufacturing processes, multiple restorations that share properties of color and material type may be milled from a single block of material, delaying production until sufficient restoration designs are ready to be milled from a single multi-unit block.
Materials suitable for use in milling into complete restorations include pre-sintered ceramic blocks, each of which have unique predetermined shrinkage information corresponding to a factor by which the material block will shrink when fully sintered. Many conventional dental milling systems determine a numerical code for machining the dental prosthesis that accounts for the unique shrinkage information associated with the assigned material block, tying production of the dental prosthesis to the assigned material block. Thus, a given dental prosthesis cannot be manufactured until the specified material block is placed in a milling machine, which can slow production of dental prostheses, and reduce system resiliency in the event of machine or material failure
In conventional processes, once milled blocks are manually retrieved from the mill by a technician, material sprues that hold the restorations to the remaining material block are manually removed. Separating milled restorations from remnant block material and removing sprues from the milled restoration by manual techniques delays completion of the final restoration and introduces the potential that the final restoration will deviate from the original design. Subsequently, restorations are sintered, and then may be stained and glazed before being returned to the dentist for placement in the mouth of a patient. Accordingly, improvements to dental milling processes and systems are desirable.